Filling That Vase
by Douglas Young
part 1
Having taught college for over 33 years, I was blessed to teach many thousands of students. Most eventually faded from memory, but some are firmly ensconced in my mind forever. One is “Pamela” from a summer many, many years ago. She was a cute elf of a girl with a pretty face, short brown hair, and just enough freckles for a female Huck Finn. I envied her freedom to walk barefoot into the library holding a kitten and offering whatever she was eating to the librarian. She also didn’t hesitate to visit my office or even my house right across the street from hers just off campus to discuss anything.
I felt honored sitting on her porch in the evening as an audience of one while she strummed an original song on the guitar. Though obviously talented, when told so, she flashed an embarrassed grin before hiding her face in her arm. Similarly, when asked if she had left a small vase of marbles and wildflowers on my back porch, she gave her Stan Laurel smile and nodded. Another time she left a trail of bright red strawberry stickers on a few faculty office doors. I was delighted one graced mine.
But Pamela’s often joyful demeanor could not conceal a desperate search to discern the beat of her own drummer. Her often impish spontaneity and warm openheartedness were all the more remarkable in the face of her schizophrenia, depression, and vain attempts to hide from both amidst a haze of hallucinogenic drugs. Indeed, psychiatric hospitalizations, a suicide attempt, and plenty of other ordeals confirmed she had crammed way too much heartbreak into just 19 years.
As much as I prefer thinking of Pamela as a perpetually charming pixie, she more often exuded extreme anguish, loneliness, and despair. During class lectures, she was never out of my view. I don’t recall her ever taking notes, but on good days she maintained eye contact for the entire period. If she spoke up, it was likely an unintelligible remark that suddenly evaporated into a childish grin before she buried her head in her arm. “Well, that’s an interesting point,” I’d stammer above many students’ nervous smiles and shifting feet.
By July, Pamela began arriving to class late, if at all, and appeared almost like a somnambulist dragging a heavy load before collapsing in her seat. Then she would stare at the desk, doodle with artwork, or be absorbed in her blue toenails. She often left the classroom only to return 20 minutes later at the same slow pace, oblivious to all. When I once suggested we cut short the mid-class break since we were behind, Pamela tearfully cried out how unfair that was. Her obvious pain and my desire to avoid another outburst determined we would keep our intermission.
My relief at her somehow pulling a B on the first test was tempered by a growing concern about her increasingly aberrant behavior. I was especially fearful of her rising drug usage. Though keenly aware I had zero training as a therapist, I stepped up my efforts to encourage her — albeit gently — to restrict her “medicines” to those prescribed and seek professional help again. But no other course of conversation could prompt such an exasperated, defensive outburst. “You don’t understand, dude!” she’d wail before reciting a litany of failed psychiatric efforts and complaining, “I can’t feel anything when I take my meds.” So I balanced urging what I thought to be imperative with the very real possibility of losing what little influence I had. After all, I assumed Pamela sought my friendship precisely because I accepted her eccentricity and didn’t preach.
About the fifth week of the quarter, I learned she had just endured an especially bad reaction to some illegal mushrooms or LSD and had been put in a mental hospital 40 miles away. Reaching her by phone doused any lingering hope Pamela wasn’t a lost child, terribly alone. I tried repeatedly and just could not get through to her. It was as if she were teetering on the edge of a steep precipice, crying for help but unwilling or unable to grasp anyone’s hand. Not one to dwell on her own problems, she even put another patient on the line, wanting me to meet her newest friend. All Pamela asked for were candy and cigarettes. Always generous, she gave most of these away according to “Bill,” a professor and close friend of mine who visited her at the hospital.
Perhaps in part because our school lacked a therapist, Bill’s and my offices had long been magnets for the emotionally fragile and lonely, either because we could recognize their favorite bands or were just willing to listen and offer advice free of finger-pointing. Pamela was our most frequent visitor that summer. Whereas her often bizarre comments and behavior startled some, we knew her to be a sweet soul merely attuned to another wavelength. But, though still often charming in her uniquely infectious way, her ever stranger ramblings left us drained and worried.
When she came back from the hospital a few weeks later, summer was waning and her spark, which had so often flickered before, had gone out. There was no more enthusiasm or silly fun. Having long withdrawn from her classes, Pamela slowly shuffled around like a ghostlike specter silently haunting the campus. Once, when I called to her from a distance, she actually jumped in fear before mustering a half-hearted grin. No longer did she visit the office or engage in conversation. She had even gently recoiled from my hug welcoming her back. She also began making dark religious allusions about the summer’s floods and showed me a hodge-podge of her writings which only confirmed my suspicion (and her ready admission) that the latest hospitalization had been another failure.
Shortly before moving away in August, she came by the office to announce, “I’m gonna’ go to California and be big and lead the revolution just like him,” pointing to a poster of John Lennon. Recalling how casually she had earlier spoken of a suicide attempt, I begged her again to promise calling if she felt suicidal. When asked if she needed my numbers again, her face lit up and she nodded eagerly before leaving with them. Feeling helpless, I simply prayed for her.
I didn’t see her again until the last pretty day of the year, in November, as I ran across campus to queue up in the school cafeteria’s dinner line. In front of the building, I suddenly heard a drawled but cheerful “Hey, Mr. Young!” There was Pamela, grinning and beautiful as never before in a charming black dress, standing atop a raised flower bed surrounded by several students, holding her perpetual cigarette. Not wanting to get stuck in the back of the line on “rib night,” I’m ashamed to admit I only managed a surprised “Hello” and resolved to speak with her after eating. But she was gone when I returned an hour later. How I’ve regretted not stopping to chat earlier.
The next April I was reading at the library late one afternoon when a staffer familiar with Pamela came over to get a paper.
“Hey, there’s a report on the Internet that that girl you tried to help last year just killed herself,” she informed me in a matter of fact, slightly gossipy tone.
A creeping chill started in my chest and made its way down to my stomach just like all the other times I’ve been truly scared. But this one produced an eerie sensation I’d not encountered before. I stared at the newspaper rack and felt as if time had suddenly stopped.
“And I think it’s true,” she declared.
In spite of all my dread that just such a nightmare would befall my friend, the thought of Pamela in the past tense felt absolutely alien. For several long minutes, it was tough to think at all. Indeed, this was the first time I’d heard of trouble with Pamela without immediately proposing, “Oh, she needs to do this or that,” and then asking “How can I help?” Instead, I sat not knowing what to do or even think.
When my gaze finally met the paper I was holding, its news seemed trivial and I couldn’t read anymore. As in times past, to avoid feelings of despair, I resolved to throw myself full throttle into some kind of constructive task. My immediate obsession was to get to the office phone (this was before most everyone had a cell phone) and find out the truth. But what I assumed would be easily acquired information turned into the investigative equivalent of starting a stalled car. Pamela’s hometown police department kept transferring my call to officers who said I needed to speak to someone else who was invariably out. Each explained he couldn’t confirm such information anyway. Finally, a young lady at the bottom of the bureaucracy admitted that, although she couldn’t release the name, there had, in fact, been a local 20-year-old girl who had died over the weekend. She suggested I call the small town’s newspaper.
It was another nice lady working late that evening at the paper who buried any last hope it wasn’t Pamela. After reciting the pitiful little name-rank-and-serial-number obituary, we agreed it cried out for something, anything, to three-dimensionalize her. So I added some favorable quotes we hoped could comfort the family.
Because no one either knew or would say how she died, I contacted the funeral home the next day. Though it may have been morbid, I didn’t want any lingering questions about Pamela’s death marring my memories of her life. It was the mortician/coroner who reluctantly confirmed she had indeed killed herself at home while her parents were at an Easter Vigil Mass. She used one pistol shot. Hopefully she died instantly. And, yes, Pamela left a note.
Copyright © 2021 by Douglas Young
